Porting my site to Jekyll and GitHub pages

Oct 1, 2017

Unbeknownst to me, my hosting over at GoDaddy acquired some gnarly malware awhile back. To be fair to them, I kind of regard all their email as useless, so I’m sure they tried to inform me. That said, it was a bummer when an old WordPress site I kept around for no good reason managed to infect and take down everything I had set up on GoDaddy and an even bigger bummer when I was told I’d need to fork over a minimum of $80 to remedy the situation. Given that the convenience of staying with them despite their irritating sales tactics had now evaporated, I figured I might as well move this thing over to GitHub pages and go full Jekyll.

Some of the pros:

Finally getting off FTP. It never really mattered to me on a personal site, but it’s good to break that habit.

I’ve also employed the glorious fluid typography techinique I learned from Mike Riethmuller at last year’s CSS Dev Conf coupled with system fonts for body copy text. I’m really loving the way the type scales seamlessly with minimal media queries and system fonts tend to feel right on whatever environment I’m on. They’re a bit heavy on macOS, but one thing at a time.

I’ve lost some of the niceities from jQuery. Specifically, an easy to implement scrolling header, smooth scrolling to page regions and fade in fade out effects with, well, fadeIn and fadeOut.

I’m not really digging full page refreshes anymore. Clicking from a nav to different pages feels a bit antiquated at this point, despite the fact that it’s still the paradigm for 99.999999% of the web. I’d much prefer some hot page region content swaps based on state or something similar, but you know, MVP and all.

I modified the default Jekyll theme, which I acknowledge is sub-optimal, and I need to dig out from under some of the cruft. Getting there though..

There’s still plenty more to do. First of all, I need to get https figured out so I can drop a Service Worker in here. I have some work to do on the nav to make it a bit more robust on mobile for the majority of user expectations. I’d also be well served compartmentalizing the JS a bit and making the tooling set up a bit more refined versus the splatter paint approach I used to get this thing out the door.

And of course, there’s a good case for a redesign, but all in good time. For now, though- Grid! Shape Outside! Font Face Observer! Fluid Type! Arrow functions! Cloudfare CDN!

Most importantly, I’m hoping the new set up inspires me to write more than once every 18 months. A few times a year would be a big win.